Linking structural and rheological memory in disordered soft materials.

Linking the macroscopic flow properties and nanoscopic structure is a fundamental challenge to understanding, predicting, and designing disordered soft materials. Under small stresses, these materials are soft solids, while larger loads can lead to yielding and the acquisition of plastic strain, which adds complexity to the task. In this work, we connect the transient structure and rheological memory of a colloidal gel under cyclic shearing across a range of amplitudes a generalized memory function using rheo-X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (rheo-XPCS).